AGTA Member Profile - Prima Gems
This AGTA Member Profile is part of an ongoing collaboration between AGTA and Diamondoodles. What is overwhelmingly apparent from my time attending AGTA events is that the community of AGTA Members is what gives AGTA its unique flavor and diversity in the jewelry industry. By exploring the culture and philosophies of the diverse AGTA members and their businesses through in-depth on-site interviews, I hope to provide new insight into the world of colored gemstones and the global jewelry community.
When we are young, so often our inclination is to rebel, whether it’s against our parents, trends, teachers, or our best interest makes no difference. For Jaimeen Shah, owner of Prima Gems, the story is no different. Growing up in India with his brother, father, uncle, and grandfather all working in jewelry and gemstones, the assumption was that Jaimeen would follow suit and join the industry. With a passion for computer science, Jaimeen saw himself pursuing a different path. At 18, Jaimeen left his home in Jaipur to get a degree in computer science in Bombay, the city where he had spent his formative years.
Despite his firm belief that gemstones weren’t for him, he agreed to spend his summers during university working for his uncle. Even though he is third generation in the jewelry industry, Jaimeen didn’t quite know what kind of experience he was in for his first summer. Just before he began working for him, Jaimeen’s uncle acquired one of the world’s biggest Tsavorite mines. Due to his health, his uncle wasn’t able to travel to the mine and instead sent Jaimeen, so that there would be a family member onsite to oversee the mine’s production. So, at the age of 21 Jaimeen headed to Tanzania to oversee the mining operation.
Jaimeen is enthusiastic and detailed in recounting the experience of his first summer in Tanzania. Listening to his account of this sink-or-swim experience, all the while knowing that it led him to founding Prima Gems makes the story all the more intriguing.
Jaimeen at his desk in the Prima Gems New York office.
Upon reaching Arusha in summer 2004, Jaimeen was loaded into a van with two armed guards, a cook, and the provisions they would need while at the mine (seemingly, a lot of potatoes). During the weekends, he would live at the mine. As a vegetarian, that meant he would eat fried potatoes for three meals a day, while his employees enjoyed hunting their food in the bush. Work was sunrise to sunset sifting through the buckets of material brought out of the mine. Since he was truly new to stones, Jaimeen’s number one directive was “look for the green stones”. As night fell, and animals would come to drink from the mine’s reservoir Jaimeen would honor his six pm curfew when he would be locked into his room for the evening with the day’s find of stones, while the aforementioned body guards would stand guard and sleep outside of his room.
Photos of Jaimeen from a recent trip to Africa and two Prima Gems Tsavorite garnets.
During the week, he would travel back to the office in Arusha and sort the past weekend’s finds. This process repeated itself all summer. When confronted with this lifestyle, most people go one of two ways: they love it or they hate it. Lucky for us, after this first experience Jaimeen fell in love with the gemstones and the industry.
For three summers during his school years Jaimeen traveled to Africa to work for his uncle. Upon graduating, the one-time rebel’s passion for gems was too strong to deny and Jaimeen decided to enter the gemstone industry. With some of the rebel left in him, he told his family that while he wanted to work with gemstones, he did not want to work for the family.
His family supported the decision and Jaimeen’s drive to find his own place. They helped him invest in New Era Gems, based in Grass Valley, California, and in 2007 he moved to the United States to begin work. Life in Grass Valley wasn’t entirely satisfying for Jaimeen, but he was learning the customer service side of the industry from the point of view of a rough dealer. As he transitioned from rough supplier as part of a mining operation to dealer, he still felt like a miner. When put in the position to buy parcels of rough, it pained him to ask for lower prices, remembering what it was like to be at the mine working all day only to uncover a handful of good stones. But it was working in this position that he learned the importance of competitive pricing, since he was no longer the top of the supply chain of the materials he was dealing in. By the same token, these experiences solidified the importance of paying people fairly in order to maintain a customer base. Even today his motto regarding his customers is, “the day I [start to] deal with them is the day I should have them for life.”
(Left) Rose cut sunstone lined up in a display box for an upcoming tradeshow. (Right)Oval cut Arizona Peridot, one of the materials Prima Gems has an interest in.
After five years in Grass Valley, Jaimeen moved to New York to start Prima Gems, dealing in faceted stones instead of rough. With only a small array of gemstones, East African material, he was determined to secure himself a spot at the AGTA Gemfair in Las Vegas that first year. He started from the very bottom of the waiting list, but after calling Mary Lou at AGTA every week, his efforts paid off. Just before the Vegas show, Mary Lou had found an eight foot by eight foot space near a fire exit where Jaimeen could set up. Despite not being in the thick of the show floor, his first trade show as Prima Gems went amazingly well and Jaimeen did a year’s worth of business in one show. Looking back on it now, he’s not surprised since he was selling trays of beautiful 6 to 10 carat Mahenge Spinel. AGTA had taken a chance on Prima Gems, and Jaimeen has been dedicated to the organization ever since, joining that year in 2011 and exhibiting at all of their shows (GemFair™ Tucson, GemFair™ Vegas, and JA New York) every year since.
It was through AGTA that Jaimeen found a number of mentors including Bruce Bridges, Ruben Bindra, and BJ Hackman. A piece of advice that has stuck with him came from a conversation he had with Bill Larson. Bill said to Jaimeen, “You’re an East African gem dealer. You won’t be a ‘gem dealer’ unless you challenge yourself to look through materials that American buyers want”. Jaimeen marks this conversation as a turning point in his goals for Prima Gems.
A selection of calibrated Montana Sapphire.
These tourmaline beads and this impressive bi-color Tourmaline come from the same mine production and are an example of how Jaimeen likes to partner with mines on their full production.
What Jaimeen is most proud of is his ability to partner with mines to transform full productions of gemstone rough into salable goods. He works with his brother in Jaipur to polish, tumble, or facet the rough he buys into a range of goods from beads to rose cuts, faceted goods to exceptional oneof a kind stones. He sees his part in this process as creating added value for parts of the production that would go overlooked. Jaimeen has used this skill to expand Prima Gems’ offerings from East African goods to include Sri Lankan and American gemstones as well. For example, Prima Gems has the biggest interest in Oregon Sunstone, Arizona Peridot, and Montana Sapphire.
Even while spending his days surrounded by gemstones, Jaimeen is still excited by the stones that come across his desk. His favorite color is green and, unsurprisingly, his favorite gemstone is Tsavorite garnet. Green elicits an emotional response from Jaimeen. Back when he was studying computer science, his grandmother would tell him to take breaks from staring at the screen. Her prescription was to take ten minutes every hour and look out at the trees. This exercise created a love of the lush fresh green hues of the mangroves in him. To this day, when a new parcel of faceted Tsavorite comes in, Jaimeen will pick out a piece in the perfect Tsavorite green hue to keep in his personal collection.
Looking through his personal collection both reveals some mind-boggling stones and a few that appear more benign. When I was handed a deeply purplish magenta emerald cut stone, I thought it must be a beautiful pink sapphire, but I was also confused since that material isn’t typical of Prima Gems. When Jaimeen told me it was Zoisite I was shocked. Having seen pink Zoisite plenty of times, I had never seen a stone this saturated without any hint of grey or yellow to interfere with the pink hue. The story behind how he acquired the stone was equally thrilling. As he was getting into the car in Arusha to head to the airport after a buying trip in 2012, one of his dealers approached him to show him a stone. In a hurry, Jaimeen brushed him off and told him to go upstairs to his uncle’s office and show him the stone instead. The man wouldn’t take no for an answer and insisted Jaimeen look at the rough and after a lot of back and forth, Jaimeen agreed to take a look. The rough was beautiful and pink but with a touch of yellow that Jaimeen knew he could cut off. He offered the man the $2000 he had left in his pocket, and sent the stone upstairs to his uncle to cut. Sometimes the right stones come into your life and this is one of the pieces that Jaimeen isn’t going to sell.
Top: Jaimeen's collection of individually selected Tsavorite garnets. Bottom: The pink Zoisite Jaimeen bought in Tanzania on his way to the airport and a pink Zoisite crystal of similar color.
Another two stones in the personal collection that have important significance to Jaimeen are two Mahenge Lotus Garnets. One is peach and the other is muted rose pink. The Lotus Garnets represent his hard work. Along with AGTA Member Parlé Gems, Prima Gems brought the Lotus Garnet material to the United States and took an unrecognized stone and made it into a desired and identifiable material in the industry.
Two Mahenge Lotus Garnets from Jaimeen's personal collection.
One final piece of advice that Jaimeen wants to leave for the next generation in the industry is to “make your own mistakes”. While everyone wants to avoid making costly errors, for Jaimeen these events are learning opportunities. “You will will never forget that you lost $9,000, but you will forget you made $90,000. [And] you won’t make that mistake again.”
